Israel struck containers at the port of Latakia, in western Syria, on Monday night, according to the official Syrian news agency SANA.

This is a rare attack by Israel against a strategic facility in Syria, and one that is so important for the Russians, who have the Khmeimim airbase south-east of the city.

It is likely that the attack was on containers belonging to the Shiite organisation Hezbollah, which has a strong presence in Syria.

Indeed, especially during the bad years of the war for the government forces, Hezbollah fighters kept the Assad government “alive“.

 

It is recalled that the base has been granted to Russia by inter-state agreement.

Snapshots broadcast by SANA show a fire in the container storage area of the port in Lattaceia.

 

Syrian state television later reported that “fire brigade teams extinguished the fire that broke out in the port of Latakia after the Israeli attack”

“At around 01:23 today (local and Greek time), the Israeli enemy launched an airstrike with several missiles targeting a container depot at the commercial port of Latakia” and the bombardment caused a fire “in a certain number of containers” without causing casualties, a source close to the Syrian army told SANA.

The Israeli armed forces rarely publicly acknowledge that they are conducting operations in Syria.
Identical information about the attack was broadcast on state television.

Since the outbreak of the war in Syria in 2011, Israel has launched hundreds of strikes, almost all of them from the air, against the positions of the Syrian government forces and their allies, Iranian and pro-Iranian armed organisations, in particular the Lebanese Shiite armed faction Hezbollah.

 

Three Syrian soldiers and two Syrian pro-Iranian militias affiliated to Hezbollah were killed in these strikes, according to information from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based NGO with a wide network of sources in the war-torn country